Modo Antiquo

Nicolas Chédeville, Il Pastor Fido

[abstract from the Critical commentary by Federico Maria Sardelli, translated by Michael Talbot]

It was in 1990 that, thanks to the discovery of an illuminating Déclaration dated 1749, Philippe Lescat finally set to rest the many doubts that had plagued the attribution of the controversial Op. 13, the famous Pastor Fido that had until then been one of the most frequently performed and best liked of Vivaldi’s collections. He showed once and for all that the Venetian priest had composed no “Op. 13”, and that the true author of the collection was in fact Nicolas Chédeville the younger (le cadet), an oboist and player of the musette who was related to the Hotteterre dynasty and the composer of several collections of chamber music, as well being a teacher and instrument-maker. How could the deception have lasted for so long? Over 250 years had elapsed since the appearance in Paris, at the music shop of Mme Boivin, of a set of sonatas whose title-page read:

The innocent Parisian public had no grounds to suspect anything underhand. This was a time when, towards the end to the 1730s, Vivaldi’s music was enjoying its glory days in France. Between 1737 and 1751 Mme Boivin and the Le Clerc brothers issued as many as thirteen editions of Vivaldi’s music, either in its original form or arranged in various ways. During a period when Vivaldi’s reputation was in decline in Italy, a fact that soured his last years, the French public and French composers responded with enthusiasm to the spirit of his music: Joseph Bodin de Boismortier, Michel Blavet, Michel Corrette and Nicolas Chédeville, to mention only the most eminent names, made a point of composing works in the Vivaldian manner, or else placed into circulation transcriptions and arrangements of the Venetian priest’s most celebrated compositions. Obviously, The Four Seasons were the works most familiar to, and dearest to the hearts of, the French public; from 1728 onwards, Jean-Pierre Guignon played them several times at the Concert Spirituel, and on 25 November 1730 King Louis XV himself commanded a scratch performance of the “Spring” Concerto (La Primavera), in which the inevitable Guignon was accompanied by an orchestra made up of nobles. The appearance of such publications as Le Printems ou les Saisons amusantes by Chédeville and the Laudate Dominum de coelis, Motet à grand choeur dans le concerto du Printems de Vivaldi by Corrette testifies eloquently to the fashion of those years.

Italian composers as a whole – with Vivaldi at their head – had succeeded in making inroads into the taste of the formerly very insular French, and the race was therefore on to acquire the rights to publish their music. The Le Clerc brothers, Jean-Pantaléon and Charles-Nicolas, managed to gain a kind of monopoly over the publication and marketing, within France, of Italian music. In 1733 Jean-Pantaléon became the agent of Le Cène, who was the leading Dutch music publisher and the authorized engraver of all Vivaldi’s collections with opus number, as well as of those by other prominent Italian composers. For his part, Charles-Nicolas obtained on 9 March 1736 an official privilege to “faire imprimer, graver et donner au public plusieurs ouvrages de musiques de différens auteurs qui ont pour titre: tout Corelli, douze oeuvres de Vivaldi, neuf oeuvres d’Albinoni, neuf oeuvres de Valentini”. Le Clerc evidently did not know that Albinoni’s Op. 10 had only just been brought out by Le Cène, but he made no mistake about the number of Vivaldi collections – twelve – that had been issued. After the disappointments of his association, in his early career, with the Venetian printers Sala and Bortoli, Vivaldi had turned to Amsterdam and the firm of the famous Etienne Roger. From L’Estro Armonico, Op. 3, right through to Op. 12, Roger ¬– and, after his death, his son-in-law Michel-Charles Le Cène – was his sole authorized publisher. However, towards the beginning of the 1730s various unfortunate personal and commercial experiences persuaded Vivaldi to cease publishing his music, since he could earn more by selling his concertos singly in manuscript. After 1729, the year in which his Op. 12 appeared from Le Cène, Europe saw no new published collections by him.

Suddenly, after almost ten years of silence, an Op. 13 by Vivaldi burst upon the scene in Paris, where he had never possessed direct contacts or a publisher. The privilege to publish it was sought not by the Le Clerc firm, as one might have expected, since it already held rights over all the other collections, but by Jean-Noël Marchand, a musician related to the Hotteterre and Chédeville families who had been born in 1700 and was taken into the Ecurie as a “tambour et fifre du roi” in 1725. On 21 March 1737 Marchand received permission to:

fair jmp[rim]er. et graver et donner au public les treize et quatorzieme oeuvre de Vivaldy, la dixieme oeuvre d’Albinony, la dixieme oeuvre de Valentiny sans paroles pour la musette et vielles.

It is clear that this Marchand, who had never been active previously as a publisher, was laying claim to a territory lying just beyond that owned by the Le Clerc brothers. He, too, believed erroneously that Albinoni had stopped at Op. 9, but he was quite right in thinking that there was only one way to make money from the great vogue for Italian music, and that was to bypass the Le Clerc monopoly by obtaining a privilege for works not yet published, thus sporting opus numbers higher than those quoted in the Le Clerc patents. By seeking and acquiring this privilege, Marchand implied that he was already in possession of Vivaldi’s Opp. 13 and 14, collections still unknown to the world. At that time, no one in Paris was in a position to know that Vivaldi no longer had any interest in circulating his music in published form or that he would, in any case, never have considered entrusting it to a firm other than his favoured Dutch one. The false Op. 13 could therefore emerge unchallenged.

Was Marchand himself therefore the author of Il Pastor Fido, as was long believed? His humble musical background and his meagre tally of compositions – a solitary collection of elementary Airs pour deux tambourins, musettes et vielles, published before 1737 – rule him out immediately. In fact, the Op. 13 that appeared under the name of the famous Vivaldi was a mélange containing not only very simple movements and galanteries in the French style but also moments of fine music and some strong ideas that were sustained with a mastery to which a simple player such as Marchand could hardly aspire. It was only in 1990 that the identity of this unknown but capable counterfeiter came to light, when the Déclaration signed in person by Marchand revealed him beyond question to be Nicolas Chédeville. After twelve years of concealment, it was Marchand himself, his sixth cousin, who brought Chédeville’s name out into the open, impelled – so he said – by a desire to serve truth (“rendre hommage a la vérité”). Marchand threw aside the mask by putting his name to a long legal deposition, dated 17 September 1749, in which it was finally admitted that:

En mil sept cent trente six Et mil sept cent trente sept, S[ieu]r. nicolas Chedeville, hautbois de la chambre du Roy, auroit composé Entr’autres choses le Treizieme oeuvre de vivaldy […].

But why, then, had it not been Chédeville himself who applied for the privilege relating to his Vivaldian forgery? On this matter, Marchand gives little away, noting merely:

Sr. Chedeville voulant mettre cet ouvrage au jour, et ayant des Raisons Particulieres pour qu’il ne parut par son nom, auroit prié Led.[it] S[ieu]r. Marchand d’agréer quil obtint sous le sien Privilege de sa majesté […].

So the distant cousin, Marchand, put his name forward in order to conceal the identity of the true author. What could have been the “Raisons Particulieres” to which the document alludes? The closing years of the 1730s coincide with the height of the vogue for the musette, a refined pseudo-pastoral instrument that captured very effectively the Arcadian world conjured up by the arts and in literature. In 1737 – the same year that Il Pastor Fido came out – the famous Hotteterre Le romain issued his Méthode de musette, which was reprinted in the following year. 1737 was also the year when the nobleman Gaspard de Gueidan had himself immortalized by Hyacinthe Rigaud in a magnificent painting in which he shows off his musette decked out with ivories and brocades. The fashion for pastourellerie, a fertile terrain for the cultivation of the musette and the vièle (hurdy-gurdy), did not win over all the critics, some of whom continued to regard the little bagpipe as a coarse, clumsy (“grossier, maladroit”) instrument. If it could be shown that even a great composer, the famous Vivaldi, was willing to devote an entire new collection to the “galant” musette, the resistance of the last critics might be overcome, and new artistic and pecuniary space might be won for the practitioners of the instrument.

Chédeville had distinguished himself up to then as a player, teacher and maker of the musette. Nearly all his many sonatas and suites – habitually characterized as “amusantes” – were intended for the musette. Even though alternative instruments such as the flute, oboe or violin were invariably specified, their musical style never transgressed the limits of key and compass imposed by the bagpipe. Having already committed six collections to print, Chédeville judged that the right moment had come to bring before the public his pseudo-Vivaldi, with which he hoped both to win definitive acceptance for his favourite instrument and to exploit the potential for economic gain promised by that illustrious name. Unwilling to undertake such a delicate and risky operation in the open, he persuaded his more obscure cousin ¬– doubtless tempted by the prospect of sharing in the proceeds – to take out the privilege on his behalf.

However, Il Pastor Fido did not turn out to be quite the success for which its instigators hoped. The collection was not advertised in the press and was not reprinted, unlike Chédeville’s other publications. This may well have been the reason why the two cousins did not pursue the idea of continuing with a fictitious Op. 14. For his part, Chédeville, perhaps chastened by the experience, went on to publish music only under his own name. Such works included his transcription-cum-adaptation of The Four Seasons and other concertos from Vivaldi’s Op. 8, which appeared in 1739 under the title of Le Printems ou les Saisons amusantes. There followed other transcriptions, likewise adapted for the inevitable musette: the Op. 4 of Dall’Abaco (1739) and arias taken from Montéclair’s Jephté (1742).

But what induced Marchand to come clean precisely in 1749? The privilege that he had taken out for Il Pastor Fido and the phantom Op. 14 ran for nine years. On its expiry, in 1746, the two cousins made no moves to renew it, perhaps discouraged by low sales or by the many risks that would be entailed. But imagine their surprise when, on 20 May 1748, Michel Corrette requested and obtained a privilege to reprint “les oeuvres de vivaldy, ayant pour titre Le Pastor Fido”. This move, which definitively removed all rights over their creation from the two cousins, probably ignited in them a peremptory desire for retaliation. Marchand waited a year, during which time Corrette did nothing, and then finally took the plunge and went to a notary. Protesting his noble desire to “serve truth”, he put a spoke in the wheel of his more famous colleague, declaring that:

led. Sieur Corrette n’etant pas autheur de cet ouvrage, et que c’est au contraire led.[it] S[ieu]r. chedeville, qui est Rellement et veritablement l’autheur auquel led.[it] S[ieu]r. Marchand n’a fait que preter son nom […].

The implication of all this was that the rights gained by Corrette over a work by a foreign composer, now deceased, could not remain valid in respect of one by a living French author. Nor could Corrette escape by claiming the work as his, as Marchand’s assertion implies he wished to. This revelation, emerging from the murky depths of a legal dispute whose details are mostly hidden from us today, was probably the reason why the publishing history of Il Pastor Fido came to such an abrupt end: Corrette had to concede victory, and the promised new edition never materialized.

The chapter was therefore closed. Each in his own way, Chédeville, Marchand and Corrette had all tried to draw profit from Vivaldi’s supposed Op. 13. Meanwhile, Vivaldi himself remained in complete ignorance of the abuse made of his name and of his musical ideas.

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